Saturday, October 4, 2008

4th Crisis Commentary: Capitalism 101

This commentary deals more with the nature of the efficiency of market investment.

commentary-4

6 comments:

Robert D Feinman said...

It would be useful if you would a) identify the link as a word document and/or b) offer it in some other format.

Many people are reluctant to download word files because they sometimes have macro viruses. They are also slow to open.

The free Open Office (which opens word files) allows one to export the document as a PDF, which would eliminate both problems.

Robert D Feinman said...

Also it would be useful to those coming in at the middle if you supplied (cumulative) links to prior postings.

Michael Perelman said...

please suggest a better format. I don't have a program to convert Word into Adobe.

Jack said...

#1:"Central to this efficiency is the ability of markets to channel capital where it is most effective."
#2:":"...."explain to me how is that markets are so efficient in directing capital where it is most needed."

Most needed or most effective? A significant distinction. In fact the answer is that capital is directed in a way that will result in the greatest return, whether its use is effective or necessary.
In the most recent credit crisis capital was sent in train loads to the purchase of mortgage backed securities and their derivatives, the credit default swap. These were not necessary forms of financial paper and they turn out to be significantly ineffective.
In the earliest phase of this directive the return on the capital was very significant, making such use of the capital appear to be effective if not needed. In the latest phase it now becomes clear that the good effect was at best temporary, though still rewarding to those who did the initial distribution of said capital, the financial managers.

So the effective, necessary or rewarding aspect of the use of capital is time sensitive and differential in its effectiveness.

Michael Perelman said...

I would argue that if you could do a controlled experiment in which a capitalist economyexisted side by size with a socialist economy -- one in which people were not contaminated with residual capitalist influences, let both run for a few decades, then ask the following question:

Which one would be more efficient?

I suspect that socialism would win hands down.

A second question would be to ask the capitalist managers if they would be better off if they had made the decision that the socialist economy made, I suspect that managers in those industries that still exist in the socialist economy as well, would probably wish that they had made the physical investments that the socialist managers had made.

Long convoluted sentence. Not enough time to translate into English.

Robert D Feinman said...

I guess I wasn't clear enough. You get a free copy of Open Office from this site:
http://www.openoffice.org/

It's a work-alike to MS Office, with word, spreadsheet, powerpoint, etc.

You don't need to use any of them. After you finish preparing your document in MS word just save it as usual and reopen it is Open Office.

Under the file menu will you will an option to export as Acrobat PDF. Just do that and close the original without doing any further changes. It beats having to pay for the Acrobat product and only takes a few seconds to perform all these steps.

I did a 200 page book this way and the whole export process was under one minute.